The first SICSA Future Cities workshop; Mobility in the Future City will take place on 4 May at the Informatics Forum, University of Edinburgh

Context

Mobility in an urban context is no longer centered on cars. Both car use and ownership are decreasing, while walking, cycling, public transport and shared transport are coming to the forefront. At the same time, mobility services are increasingly bound up with ICT developments, such as real time information delivered via smartphones and mobility monitoring via IoT sensors. Reasons for travel are also changing, as the Internet impacts on both work and shopping. Despite these changes, congestion, accidents, air pollution and traffic-related carbon emissions remain significant problems. This workshop will focus on developing a holistic view of urban mobility that is both smart and sustainable.

SICSA Future Cities Challenge

Within the ‘Smart City’ agenda, development and investment are racing on at breakneck speed, leading to new infrastructures, applications and forms of management, industry and citizenship, but also creating problems of scale, choice, interoperability, openness, security and inclusivity. There is an ever-increasing set of databases, apps and infrastructures that people can choose from, use and extend – including the centralised systems of urban authorities and national government. The priority of SICSA Future Cities Challenge is to shift the focus away from a research view narrowly focused on academic computer science to one that is firmly embedded in a cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral perspective on emerging future cities.

Aim of the workshop

The aim of the workshop is to bring together different communities: researchers, policy makers, service providers and practitioners with relevant experience in mobility. We hope that the workshop will help define a problem-centred research agenda that integrates the potential contribution of computer science to developing better mobility infrastructure in future cities. Specific topics of interest include:

Mobility as a Service – what does it involve and how do we get there?

Does Smart Mobility = Sustainable Mobility?

Mobility data: too much or not enough? Who will collect the data and control access to it?

Workshop Format

The workshop will start with scene-setting presentations from experts that represent key aspects of urban mobility. This will be followed by non-technical overviews of selected computer science approaches to the topic. The rest of the workshop will involve small groups of participants working together as multi-disciplinary teams to discover, define and develop ideas that can contribute to the research roadmap.